Tubular Envy

While a student and artist at Columbus Whetstone High School in the mid-1970s, I became especially enamored with imagery and music related to what is often referred to as the “California Myth” – hotrods, surfing, sunsets, palm trees and the like. My teachers might say I was obsessed with them, were it not also for the airplanes I also loved to depict. Tropical images were iconic to me, especially surfing, and served to inspire the themes for many an art project. I was captivated by painting the natural beauty, colors, and action of the ancient sport.

I envied my unknown peers on the West Coast and Hawaii – beach boys and surfer girls. Being able to create this artwork seemed to bring their world into my own, at least their world as I imagined it through the surfing and hotrod magazines I always seemed to have. I painted with acrylics, creating dozens of canvas boards depicting sunsets or moonlit beaches2, or surfers2345 in the tube, using a rudimentary artist’s airbrush to add highlights to the ocean scenes.

During my senior year I learned to screenprint t-shirts, most often using my parents’ garage for a print shop. I relished the freedom to conjure up an idea, create a design on a blank piece of paper, and the ability to soon after reproduce it in quantities of colorful, wearable “canvasses.” The fact that others would then pay me for my creations and proudly wear them was a bonus. I took shirt orders from groups such as our high school marching band and the scuba diving club, the latter of which I joined upon earning my certification when I was 15.